


Salt

by throttlegainwell



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Disturbing Themes, HYDRA Trash Party, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt Steve, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Past Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 11:34:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5125991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throttlegainwell/pseuds/throttlegainwell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Memory is inconvenient – for so many reasons, in so many ways. Bucky’d read the books and seen the movies and, frankly, lived the horror show. He knew the misconceptions that people so easily believed. Memories weren’t like movies; they’re not so neat, not so cleanly edited, not so purposeful. They’re just bits of collected and confusingly collated data. Attempting to get around that fact, as had so been the case for the treatment of his mind, was unnatural.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salt

**Author's Note:**

> There is no graphic depiction of sexual assault in this story, but it's a strong theme and it is discussed, so please tread lightly and be safe. This isn't really HTP, but I feel like it's too close in subject matter to not warn that some really awful, HTP-consistent stuff is implied. Normally I'd say that it's not as dark as the tags make it sound, but in this case it really is that heavy, so please read them.

Memory is inconvenient – for so many reasons, in so many ways. Bucky’d read the books and seen the movies and, frankly, lived the horror show. He knew the misconceptions that people so easily believed. Memories weren’t like movies; they’re not so neat, not so cleanly edited, not so purposeful. They’re just bits of collected and confusingly collated data. Attempting to get around that fact, as had so been the case for the treatment of his mind, was unnatural.

It wasn’t unusual for him to experience flashes of memories that felt foreign, flashes of images or senses or instincts that could be memories but were really just guesswork, just strategic imagination from a highly trained mind. It wasn’t unusual, but he accepted those. Something about them felt authentic, and he quietly swallowed them back and got on with his life. They were unpleasant, horrific, incriminating, soul-crushing, gut-hollowing. But they were his, and ignorance is not bliss, and he’d rather know. He’d done horrible things; someone should remember them.

He sees red on a concrete floor and red on broken knuckles and red that drips from a face he doesn’t think is his, and it could be any memory, really, any time, one straight from the annals of his mind, except for the sharp cold and the smell and the pain in a place where even he, tortured and degraded and dehumanized as he was, knew he never experienced. He sees red and smells air as thick with scent as a brothel’s at the end of the night and the pain knifes through him and all of this happens in seconds.

It was the sense of something happening, not a whole scene, a moment in time crystallized and blurred and fragmented through a prism, the recollections of details that stood out. It’s not like a movie. But he could hazard a guess. His mind jumped back to this uninvited, unwelcome, hazy frame of a scene when a song came on the radio, a refrain that he’d never heard before but that left a sour taste in his mouth and roiled unpleasantly in his stomach. When a man on his way out the door squeezed by him and a whiff of his aftershave filled his nostrils and triggered his gag reflex. When he was on the kitchen floor cleaning up some spilled cereal and Steve walked in and he realized that he was on his knees, looking up at someone, and it was dizzyingly clear that he violently did _not_ want to be there, didn’t think he could stand it and felt like he was falling as he wracked his brain to figure out _why_.

The Winter Soldier was a prisoner for a long time, and he was made to do many things, but none of them left him with the feelings that invaded his body as these did now. No one fucked the gun. He was sure of it. It wasn't worse than what already lived under his skin, but it was a new and unique kind of unpleasant.

These were not his memories. So who did they belong to, and what the fuck were they doing in his head?

 

* * *

 

 

There were other things, impressions of food he knew the taste of despite never having tried, people who triggered a rush of soft warmth and recognition when he saw them though they’d never met before, or still others who irritated him for no reason despite having done nothing off. When a pile of books fell off of the table and he bent to pick them up, his heart stuttered in his chest at the ache one of them inspired in him, and he realized that he knew how it ended and felt a little wounded at the tragedy the fictional characters had endured. And that was absurd, so he sat down and read it to prove himself wrong, reading it for the first time and yet not, and by the end he was just misty-eyed enough to take off for the shooting range and get it out of his system. The tang of the cordite and the punch of the explosion in the chamber, real and immediate and undeniable, wasn’t enough to convince him that he hadn’t sharply felt that same betrayal before as the lovers were separated by the author’s pen.

Sometimes he conceptualized the Winter Soldier as someone separate from himself, different and distinct. Someone had inhabited his body before, he told himself. Now he had the keys again, and however cool he played it, he was terrified of that happening again. But this other life, fully formed and realized, this other soul pushing its way into his, was nothing like that. He knew that it was someone else, someone very real out there somewhere. In another life he might have said that someone was reaching out to him, but he wasn’t that boy anymore, young and desperate for connection and hopeful for a loving god to make this all mean something. He’d seen too much to put much stock there anymore.

No, it had to be something else. And the more time passed, the stronger the connection grew. The deeper the memories reached. But they were never clear enough to _understand_ , never enough to piece together much beyond that moment, flashes of images or connections from smells or half-remembered aches or intense feelings of want and fear and hope and sadness, anger and regret and soaring joy so bright his chest muscles contracted and he winced.

Tendrils of memory, wisps of recognition, creeped through his mind. Different every day, more potent and more dangerous at the same time. Sitting at a coffee shop he tried to place a sensation for a whole minute before he realized that it was the feeling of hipbones pressing into his palms that he recognized, of looking up through a strong pair of legs, past a flat stomach and firm breasts, at eyes shut tight in pleasure. Holding those hips down and in place while they tried to wriggle. Musk in his nose, on his tongue. Flashes of red hair, a cocoon of humid warmth. A soft laugh. All that because the barista had red hair and laughed at the puns her colleague was telling. He didn’t know who the redhead in his mind was, but it undoubtedly was not her. He stayed a little longer than he’d planned to will away the erection that followed, which wasn’t hard, because soon after that particular daydream had dissipated a cellphone rang behind him, the ringtone set to that _one goddamn song_ that had steadily made him more and more nauseous every time he heard it; every time strangled his breath in his chest and made the bile rise in his throat until he thought he’d choke on it. He swallowed down the burning, swallowed down the anger and shame that he didn’t even understand, and realized that he wasn’t hard anymore, almost felt like he’d never be able to achieve an erection ever again. But that was silly, and of course he would, and it wasn’t his fucking memory that had him tied up in so many knots.

By the time any of it started to make any sense, he’d started to feel almost protective of the psychic stranger. After all, they’d shared intimate thoughts. They’d been hurt, but he felt their strength, their drive. And they weren’t trying to exert themselves over Bucky’s mind in any way, just opening theirs up to his. He was still going to have to find a way to sever their connection, but it didn’t feel malicious, despite the overwhelming trauma and pain spilling over into him. He just wasn’t sure that he could handle it on top of his own. If he could find the mystery person and stop the psychic leak, maybe they could just talk over coffee.

He was sitting down to some pancakes and browsing through old SHIELD files on known telepaths when Steve walked into the kitchen rubbing his arm, face pulled into a stormy expression. He was kneading the muscle so hard it looked painful, and after a minute Bucky imagined a sympathetic twinge where his arm used to be.

“You okay?” he asked, smoothly evading that train of thought in a way that he never could back in the day but he’d become quite skillful at now.

Steve didn’t answer right away. He sat at the table, leaning his elbows into the rough surface and distractedly pushing up his sleeve to graze the pads of his fingers over a quarter-sized patch of skin on his upper arm. It was already bruising from the force of his handling.

It was such a _specific_ gesture. Such a specific spot.

“Buck,” he said, voice pitched low, “I think something happened in Cairo.”

“What makes you say that?”

He didn’t answer right away. “It can’t be just me. Haven’t you noticed anything strange?” His fingertips dug right back into his arm, pressing the skin white and bloodless in four perfect circles.

“Yeah. Just some weird shit in my jumbled head. I try not to let it get to me too much. My life? Could be anything, really.”

Steve swallowed. “That’s fair, I guess. But … this isn’t like that. And my memory is just as good as it ever was. Only now it’s _more_. Too much to fit. Another lifetime of stimuli and synaptic connections that don’t belong. I _feel_ things that I know I never experienced. I remember things, words that bounce around, voices I don’t recognize. Reflexes that I’ve never had before. And I couldn’t figure out where this was all coming from, whether someone was trying to hurt me or get into my head, until…”

Bucky was completely silent as Steve put into words exactly what he’d been struggling with for these past few weeks, what he’d begun to resign himself to. He waited for Steve to finish.

“When we marched back to camp, you had a bandage on your arm. Right here.” His fingers squeezed harder. Bucky’s stomach shrunk. “You kept it covered for months and when you finally stopped bothering and I saw what it was, that it was a brand, that they’d done that to you…”

“It was for organizational purposes,” Bucky cut in, voice flat. “Like labeling your test tubes.”

Steve’s mouth pinched into a thin line. “I knew what it was, but I wasn’t there. Except I _can_ remember it. What it felt like, what it _smelled_ like, watching the iron come closer until it moved out of my line of vision and not being able to turn my head to follow it, being strapped in place … Bucky, that has to be _your_ memory. Why on earth do I have it?”

Bucky’s insides had been scooped out and replaced with fiberglass and stuffing. There was a buzzing in his ears not unlike the white noise of a quiet room, but it was drowning out his beating heart banging wildly in his chest, pumping blood ferociously up to his racing brain and down to his tingling fingertips and all the way to his leaden feet. And he knew, suddenly, what had been going on. He opened his mouth without meaning to, indelicate and blunt and thoughtless, and what came out he wished immediately that he could take back and smother ‘til it dies.

But he couldn’t, and it lived, and those words took root in Steve’s mind and now they were sowing their own seeds and Bucky had started something, opened something, that he could never close.

“Probably for the same reason I remember being gang-raped in a place I’ve never been by people I’ve never met.”

Steve only looked devastated for a half a second -- like it genuinely hadn't occurred to him that the connection went both ways -- before a defiant, challenging expression took over him. His shoulders came up, and his chin, and his eyes, all rising like the heat of a fire. “Then I guess we should see what we can do about this. I’ll get the mission files.”

He got up without another word. Bucky sat down and contemplated how words that never actually formed in his brain, an articulation of a memory that never took shape into something real and recognizable, could fly out of him so precise and barbed and _ready_. But he knew. He just _knew_ , felt it in his bones.

And now he knew whose head he’d been sharing these past few weeks.

He dug a bottle of gin out of an upper cabinet, a glass out of another, and he drank silently, swishing the alcohol across his tongue and up into his palate before swallowing. He rolled the glass between his palms and scooted it back and forth across the table and stared at the grain and for a few minutes, at least, while he prepared himself to be useful, prepared himself to deal with all of this, he gave himself permission to do absolutely nothing and think absolutely nothing and just be calm. He’d process it later. And they’d figure this out.

But right now, he drank.

* * *

 

The true horror of what Steve had told him didn’t kick in until he was rinsing out his glass and putting the half-empty bottle away. Steve remembered Bucky’s life, his years of abuse and use and torment. His kills. His guilt, his shame, his subjugation.

He remembered what it felt like, what it looked and sounded and smelled like, to be the person who Bucky was still trying to assimilate.

He’d gladly shoulder the weight of Steve’s pain, once he swallowed down his anger at someone having inflicted it in the first place, but he wouldn’t wish his misery on anyone, least of all Steve.

He reached up to his arm and touched the metal where the brand used to be, back when it was flesh.

 

* * *

 

Bucky was sure that he must smell like a distillery by the time he went into the living room to find Steve with files and tablets spread out across every horizontal surface. Steve’s nose wrinkled quickly when he walked in, eyes still focused on his work. He didn’t say anything about it.

Bucky had the sudden memory of cigarette smoke burning his eyes and scouring his throat, blown from blurry blobs of faces that no longer even resembled people this many years out. Gin was an old-fashioned drink, he guessed, with ancient associations that decades and the miracles of modern science couldn’t erase.

Bucky remembered watching Steve pick fights with drunks three times his size, remembered watching them lean in and laugh and smoke their scraggly cigarettes while they poked Steve in the chest, remembered Steve’s nose wrinkling the way it did just now.

He shook his head and sat down. “Find anything?”

“Not yet.” He unceremoniously dumped a pile of folders and a tablet into Bucky’s lap. “I thought there was an energy surge at one point, but none of the telemetry supported it so I stopped worrying about it eventually. You remember that?”

“Yeah, I felt that. None of the equipment caught it?”

“Not our stuff, none of the stuff in the lab either. You and I were the only ones in that section, and I won’t know for sure until I ask around, but I suspect we’re the only ones who’ve been affected.”

They worked in silence for a few minutes before Bucky looked up again. “I’m sorry. About throwing that at you.”

Steve’s shoulders tensed, but he didn’t even pause in his search. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I hadn’t realized until then whose memory it was. I was beginning to think that it really was me and I just didn’t remember it, or someone implanted it for some reason. I never would’ve thought…”

“Don’t.” He looked up. “Really.”

Bucky stopped. He knew that eventually they’d have to talk about it, whether Steve wanted to or not, so it didn’t have to be now. But it was out now, and truth was a hungry thing, and so was pain, and they ate up everything they touched.

* * *

 

 

“This is the thing?” Bucky asked skeptically. He eyed the little statue with a suspicion he normally reserved for salesmen and carnival psychics. There was a butterfly on it.

“The Obelisk of Psyche,” Steve continued, as though Bucky hadn’t interrupted, “was found at the scene and bagged with the rest of the confiscated equipment. It was assumed to be decorative, but we’re pretty thorough. Ms. Foster helpfully scanned it for us and it turns out that it was throwing off very low levels of energy, so low that it didn’t trigger alerts, but energy consistent with magic artifacts.”

“That’s why none of the telemetry registered it,” Bucky said. “‘Cause it’s fucking magic.”

“Basically.”

“Unbelievable.”

Steve was staring at the thing like it had personally fired the shot that began WW1 and ushered Europe into decades of war.

Bucky cleared his throat. “So what do we do? Ask it to knock it off and reverse everything?”

“I don’t know yet. Support staff is researching everything they can about this … goddess, but at the moment I suppose we just need to bear it out.” He crossed his arms over his chest, finally looking away from the statue with its silly butterfly wings but only to stare off into the distance at nothing in that way that Bucky’d seen a thousand times before, but never on Steve. He was beginning to realize that that was because Steve never allowed it, not because he wasn’t affected, and what did it say that Bucky was his best friend, thought he knew him so well, and he thought all this time that Steve just wasn’t as bothered by the horrors of his life as Bucky was? That Bucky was defective and hurting while Steve soldiered on like the tough, dependable guy that he was?

Since when had Bucky started to believe Captain America’s hype? He was angry at himself for trusting Steve’s act, and he was angry at Steve for hiding it in the first place. It wasn’t fair and he knew it.

“Steve, if we’re going to be stuck like this for a while…”

“I have a training session starting in fifteen minutes. Recruits don’t drill themselves.”

He walked away. Bucky swore loudly at the obelisk, daring it to make this worse, and he didn’t feel any better when it sat impassive and unaffected. He thought he felt disappointment from its general direction, but maybe that was coming from his own heavy heart.

 

* * *

 

Steve researched the obelisk with an intensity that unsettled Bucky. He couldn’t blame him, he supposed, but still. Of course Bucky wanted the connection broken, too, but he got the impression that Steve was going to fracture if he didn’t get rid of it soon. He’d never seen Steve like this. Never seen him so rattled, so determined, feverishly working to cleanse what he clearly saw as an infection from his mind. Bucky tried not to take it personally; if he’d been bombarded by his memories without warning and context, he probably wouldn’t have handled it as well as Steve had for as long. And there was the issue of what he knew about Steve now, and he still wasn’t sure how to bring that up after he’d fucked up so badly the first time.

So even though it felt an awful lot like Steve was avoiding him all week, he accepted that Steve was keeping himself busy, working with his team and working on this project and working through whatever he needed to in his head. Bucky took the opposite approach and slowed down, hoping to understand a little better what was happening to his mind instead of running from it. The effects were beginning to show, and not just in the ways that he’d have expected.

In fact, in some ways, he was almost a little regretful that they’d need to end it, not that he’d have admitted it. But he’d realized a few things.

Namely, how little he’d confided in Steve, and how badly he’d underestimated him. He thought that he was in a pretty good place these days, and the things that bothered him he could mostly find ways around, but now he didn’t have to. More and more Steve seemed to predict the things that might get to him and wordlessly mitigated them as though excising something painful. And Bucky knew that it was because he’d felt the need, too, so burdened and weary by Bucky’s pain that the smell of the cleaning solvent they’d used in the lab now made him want to retch just as badly as it made Bucky, and he knew why it bothered Bucky even though he’d never had to say it, and he got rid of it. He was stupidly grateful to Steve for these silent offerings, these adjustments for Bucky’s comfort, and he wondered why he’d never just fucking spoken up before.

It didn’t go as well when he tried to make those same little changes for Steve. During a shared breakfast so quiet that it bordered on forced, he finally cracked and turned on the radio just for something, anything, to break the gloom. The first few songs were fine, innocent and pleasing, but then that one fucking song came around again, and he shut it off so quickly that he almost knocked the radio off of the table.

And then he looked up and Steve was staring at him, totally unreadable. Bucky didn’t like not being able to read Steve, but it was happening more and more lately. He barely had time to wonder if he was imagining the accusation in Steve’s eyes before Steve was up, finishing his coffee in two big gulps and walking right out of the room. The shower started up less than a minute later.

Bucky tapped out the beat on his thigh, each rap of his fingers stinging like a bite, trying to fit it into the memory that he was beginning to piece together. He knew that he shouldn’t. It was Steve’s business, he was never supposed to see this, supposed to _feel_ this, but having someone understand what he’d been through and love him anyway, understand and help him anyway, meant so much more to him than he’d thought it would. He had to offer that to Steve. And in the meantime, it made the memories themselves easier to withstand, ice lacing through his veins instead of piercing right through his heart: unpleasant, shocking, but survivable.

 

* * *

 

He woke in the night to the smell of smoke. He immediately became alert, ready for an emergency, but after a few seconds realized that it was drifting in through his barely cracked window. He wondered distantly when he’d started feeling comfortable sleeping with the window open again, shaking his head and rubbing the heel of his hand into his eyes.

He went to check on Steve and found his bed empty, then followed a crackling sound out onto the tiny fire escape where Steve was probably illegally, definitely unsafely, burning pages of his sketchbook in a small trashcan. Soot had drifted up onto the bricks and darkened them in ominous, uneven shapes.

“I think you’re breaking about eight different fire codes, buddy,” he said, voice pitched low and soft.

Steve’s head jerked up. He paused with one page torn halfway, and Bucky expected a snort, maybe, or an eyeroll, but all Steve did was continue ripping and tossing pages right into the flames. They curled and sizzled and shrunk, some of them flying up and trying to escape the smoldering pile below, but Steve swatted them right back in with his bare hand. Bucky looked closer. There were small blisters forming on his skin.

“Steve, you alright?” He mentally kicked himself. Of course he wasn’t okay. Why else would he be outside by himself in the middle of the night burning his sketches and his hands in the process?

Steve didn’t answer. He reached up when another page curled and flew out of the can, but Bucky caught it first with his metal fingers. Soot smeared across his fingertips where he pinched it between them, but even through the damage he could tell what this was supposed to be. The full weight of this shared thing between them dropped, and he bowed his head. He had understood that his seeing Steve’s memories meant that Steve was seeing his, and that his memories were horrific, but he’d become so desensitized to them that maybe he hadn’t taken it as seriously as he thought he had, what it was really like to have that beamed into your head twenty-four/seven with no warning. Especially knowing now whose suffering it was.

He crumpled the drawing back up and dropped it into Steve’s hand so that he could toss it back into the fire. He leaned back against the window frame, and waited until Steve had emptied the whole book, and then waited until Steve had doused the fire with a petulance that didn’t suit him. But it was better than the sober solemnity that he’d been projecting the rest of the week because at least it was _something_. Bucky climbed back in first, then Steve, and since neither of them was going to sleep after that, he got out a deck of cards and quietly shuffled them for a few hands of rummy. When he set the deck down between them he gave Steve his best raised eyebrow until Steve tried to smile a little and sat down.

He’d take it.

 

* * *

 

He asked Steve where he’d tried Thai food so they could go together, because remembering what something tasted like was weird without having actually tried it, so they went out to lunch the next day, and like a dam had broken, suddenly Steve was looking at him again. They talked about nothing important, drifting around anything that mattered, and halfway through their meal Bucky had the sudden realization that while he was for sure getting some pretty nasty memories, he was also getting a lot of good ones; Steve probably wasn’t. And while Steve had been frozen for almost seventy years, Bucky had been awake for many of those, and suddenly having memories enough to fill several more years than he’d lived had to be overwhelming.

He was about to ask if Steve wanted to catch a movie after when Steve suddenly spoke up, his voice different and careful. “I think sometimes I’m remembering times we had together, but … you noticed different things from what I did. Maybe I noticed someone’s eyes, what they were doing with their hands, but what stuck for you was their voice. The same person, and we remember them so differently, and I’d forgotten what they sounded like but _you_ hadn’t. Or a battle that I remember leading, and you saw it from where you were waiting with your rifle. I remember the heat and the energy and the smell, and you remember it completely differently, from a completely different _perspective_. But we were both there. It’s so strange, Buck.”

“Haven’t we always made up for what the other was lacking?” he asked, mouth dry. He finished his water and signaled for the check, mouthing a thank you when the server nodded.

Steve nodded, but he looked so lost that Bucky almost couldn’t stand it. He wanted to reach across the table and hold Steve’s hand, just grasp it quickly and firmly, but he didn’t.

“The same thing, and we experienced it so differently,” he said again. He rubbed his palms down his leg, almost a nervous gesture.

They didn’t talk much more that day.

 

* * *

 

Research on the obelisk was slow-going, namely because despite being the goddess of souls, Psyche didn’t seem to have much to do with this department. Bucky thought that was a bit unfairly misleading.

He was flipping through the same books that had proven unhelpful the last time he’d read them in the middle of the night, having woken from one of Steve’s blurred nightmares panting and shivering and snorting bitterly at the idea of going back to sleep after that, when Steve stumbled from his room into the bathroom. Bucky glanced up, concerned, and dropped the book onto the couch to stand up when he heard retching.

He moved quietly but not silently to the doorway and stood outside, trying to give Steve privacy. He waited until Steve was finished, until he’d had a few minutes to pant himself calm and flush and rinse his mouth, before he knocked softly on the doorframe.

He opened his mouth to say something, not really knowing what, but the words formed anyway. “I’m sorry.”

Steve’s eyes widened in shock, almost wild, and Bucky took a half-step backward from the force of it. “Sorry?”

“For … I know it’s not my fault, but I’m so sorry that you have to see that. I know it’s gruesome. I know we both saw awful things in the war, and you’ve seen some pretty sticky horrible things since, but … that doesn’t make it easier.”

“Oh.” Steve’s shoulders stayed tensed, and Bucky had the sudden impression that Steve thought he was going to say something else.

“Is…” He cleared his throat. “Is there something else I should be apologizing for?”

“No,” Steve said quickly. “Of course not. Excuse me.” He turned his body to slide past Bucky’s, and when Bucky clasped his shoulder to squeeze it encouragingly, he jumped, throwing his body to the side and away.

“Don’t,” he snapped. Just as suddenly the fight drained out of him and he sagged, pressing his palms over his eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s okay, Bucky, really. I just …”

He left without finishing, sighing instead.

Bucky’s fists clenched uselessly against his thighs. He went back to the book to scan it again.

 

* * *

 

“It was different then,” Steve said one night after Bucky had woken screaming, as they sat beside each other on the couch and Bucky quietly explained the confusion and emptiness clutching his chest. The nightmare had been more vivid than ever and it was definitely not one of Bucky’s. Steve worried a loose thread in the couch with his clever fingers, looking somewhere in the range of Bucky’s shoulder and not at his face. “Captain America wasn’t a legend yet, just a guy running around being a pain in the ass. It wasn’t about symbolism; just a good old-fashioned wartime atrocity.”

He explained how it had happened on one of the missions he’d gone on solo, while they were on leave, which Bucky had always been against right from the start. He’d been grabbed, they’d had their fun, and the moment he’d gotten the advantage he’d killed them all, found the intel that he’d been after, and gotten out.

He considered the mission a success. Bucky was nauseated.

“You didn’t tell me,” he said tonelessly, numb.

“You didn’t tell me a lot of things,” Steve shot back. “It wasn’t important. And I was fine.”

“You were fine,” he huffed. “And I suppose the medical torture wasn’t important either.” That was a new memory that had surfaced recently, one he hadn’t entirely recognized as distinct at first because he had so many of those of his own. When he realized that it didn’t belong to him his heart broke.

“Of course that was important. The SSR needed to be aware that very dangerous people had biological samples that needed to be eliminated.”

“Biological samples.” He gritted his teeth, unable to play this game any longer. “You mean chunks of you they took without your permission, when they had you at their mercy.”

“No one had me at their mercy,” Steve said, rolling his eyes like the idea was ridiculous. He stopped abruptly, shooting a guilty look at Bucky. “I’m sorry. That was thoughtless. Look, it wasn’t like what happened to you. It wasn’t—“

“I know exactly what it was like. Remember?”

Even Steve couldn’t argue that one. “It was a long time ago,” he finally said. “I have a lot more on my mind now. Too much to worry about that ancient history.”

Bucky thought that he was trying to be comforting, but the idea that Steve had so much more on his plate to worry about now was anything but comforting. And it wasn’t that long ago to Steve.

He stared out the window and they didn’t talk after that. So that was the big mystery, then. That was the sharp pain and the shame that spoke volumes. That was the source of the red.

Bucky was too tired to point out that the song he’d been steadily growing to hate hadn’t been written yet back then. Not all of the pieces fit. But he was just so exhausted, so drained by the memories and the wall that Steve was trying uselessly to erect between them. He tried to figure out why Steve was having such a worse time and when he finally got it, shortly after Steve had gone back to his room, he bit his tongue until it bled.

Bucky was used to having his mind violated and ensnared. For Steve this kind of intrusion was new.

 

* * *

 

The other shoe didn’t drop for another week.

Steve still had missions to go on in the meantime and a team to lead, and he went and he did, setting aside his demons and Bucky’s to do his job and help people. From the outside he was remarkably together, but Bucky knew the truth and saw the stress, even garbed as he was in his uniform and mask.

He was away with the team when Bucky found the sketchbook stuffed behind a cabinet in the kitchen while he was cleaning up. He wouldn’t have opened it, honestly, but for the spider that crawled up his arm when he fished it out, startling him into dropping it. And it fell open. It would have been remarkably unfortunate a page for it to open to, the one that Bucky stared at in horror for several minutes before leaning down to pick it up tentatively with two fingers and no more, and that’s what he thought, just a horrible coincidence. But when he turned the pages he realized that it would have been harder to find a page untouched by the ugly scene. Almost the whole book was full of the same thing.

Almost unthinkingly he sat down and flipped through the whole thing, over and over again. On just about every page the same scene unfolded, brutal, vicious, and horrible: Steve angry, in pain, and suffering.

Steve being hurt.

He didn’t know why he knew that it was Steve. Most of the angles were from behind, just the shape of a man being held down, but somehow he knew. Eventually some of the pictures showed his face and confirmed it.

He was blindfolded and bleeding and naked. A chill passed over Bucky as though he’d been in that freezing room, and he knew, suddenly, that this memory was different. Something clicked into place. Why would Steve draw this?

He closed the book and put it away where he’d found it, left to go for a run, but when he came back he pulled it back out and left it on the table. It stayed there for all three days that Steve was away.

When Steve came back and saw the book he froze.

“That’s not from your point of view,” Bucky said, cracking open a beer for himself and one for Steve, as if this wasn’t going to be a messy and horrible conversation and they were just hanging out like old friends do. “That’s from the perpetrator’s POV. Why would you draw that?”

Steve crumpled, pulling his shoulders in and dropping his head down and sliding down the wall to the floor. Everything he’d been avoiding for the past six weeks seemed to pour down to his toes, drawing him with it.

“Bucky, I didn’t know it was you.”

Bucky sat down carefully, as though those words didn’t make him want to collapse, too, as though his legs hadn’t gone numb just hearing them. He didn’t interrupt Steve.

“I thought … I just thought … I thought a lot of things. But I didn’t know about you yet, or why they were doing it. I couldn’t see and you didn’t say anything. I just got through it and moved on.” He pressed the side of his hand to his eyes. He wasn’t crying, but maybe he ought to. “It started coming back to me a few months ago, when you moved in. I didn’t really understand why. It just … started bothering me again for some reason, like it was fresh.”

Bucky drank his beer in silence. He leaned over to push one into Steve’s hand. Steve fiddled with the label.

“I realized later that it could have been you – it made sense, in a twisted way – but I guess didn’t know for sure until I … remembered. Like an out of body experience. You watching me.”

_You watching me._

_The same thing, and we experienced it so differently._

His stomach hurt. He drank anyway. “I don’t remember that.” It came out lamely, like it made a difference. There was a lot that he didn’t remember. He’d just figured that if he didn’t remember something, neither would Steve. But this was a _magic_ connection, after all, he thought bitterly. Logic didn’t count for anything.

“I figured as much.”

He may not have remembered, but of course he believed Steve. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth to ask the damning question, but Steve seemed to sense it on his tongue and beat him to it.

“No, no, you didn’t do anything. You just held me down.”

 _You just held me down. Just._ He wished Steve hadn’t said it so matter-of-factly, like that’s really all it was. Like that was the bright spot of hope that he clung to. Bucky hadn’t brutalized him, no. He’d just held him down like a good lackey for the _other_ animals to have their turns with his best friend.

But what could he do? It was done.

Steve swallowed hard. “They played that stupid song because one of them said he’d heard it in a movie and thought it’d be funny. I saw the fucking movie. It wasn’t funny.” He rubbed his wrists.

“Look, I don’t want you to feel bad about this on my account. I know it wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry I’ve been so difficult about all of this. I just don’t think about this stuff a lot and now it’s all I can think of. Knowing that you’ve had to deal with this on top of everything you’re sorting through is … humbling. You should never have had to see all of that.”

“Basically how I feel.” Bucky finished his beer and got another, hesitated, then got Steve another despite the fact that he hadn’t touched his first one yet.

Steve looked up at him, eyebrows raised. “I already knew about a lot of that. I was prepared.”

Bucky shook his head. “No, you weren’t.”

Steve looked away, finally taking a sip. Bucky watched the column of his throat, watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. He had the vague, tentative sense of watching that before, but the movements were shaky and jerky, the skin ringed with purple-smudged bruises in the shape of fingers. There was red. He didn’t follow that train of thought. He had the sinking feeling that he knew where it would lead.

He was opening the doors. Maybe he hadn’t remembered before, but it was coming down the pike with everything else.

“I understand why you wouldn’t want me to know all of that,” he started slowly, feeling his way around what he wanted to say. “Or at least … not know it that intimately. But there’s … something kind of freeing about you knowing. It’s selfish, I know, but it’s the first time in … _years_ that I’ve really felt less alone in this. I hadn’t even realized. And I don’t regret knowing what I know about you, this side of you. I only regret that this is hurting you, and I’d make it stop if I could – we _will_ make it stop. We’ll do it. I just need you to know that this doesn’t change anything between us on my end. If it changes things for you, well … I understand. I can’t blame you.”

He let that hang between them like vapor in the air, a haze they could no longer see each other through.

Steve looked at him incredulously. “I’m not cutting you out of my life, Buck. How could you think that?”

“Steve, what you told me … What you’re seeing—“ The horror of what it must be like to relive something so horrible through the eyes of one of the people responsible, to see yourself that way, washed over him fresh. He thought that might be his undoing, if he’d had to see himself used the way he’d been, not just to know it but to _see_ it, undeniable and raw and new. Through the eyes of a friend no less …

“It’ll pass,” Steve whispered. Louder, then, “We’ll get through it. We’ve been through too much to let this get in the way. Forget what you saw. It doesn’t matter. It won’t matter, not to me. They’re just things that happened and I don’t intend to let them have a say.”

“Demons get a vote, Steve.”

“No, they don’t. If … if you get some closure from this, then maybe it’ll have been worth it. I’m glad it’s helped you. But I’ll be glad to be rid of it.” He hung his head for a moment, sighed deeply, then drained half of his beer in two gulps.

Bucky waited a while before he spoke. “I know you said that it wasn’t my fault and you don’t blame me. I kind of do, but I won’t argue that point. I just want you to know that I am sorry, not because I was there, but because it happened at all. That it wasn’t the first time. Because someone should be sorry and they’re not.”

“They’re dead. Some of them, anyway. Saw them at the battle of D.C.”

“Good. But I’m still sorry.”

Steve gave him a strange look, finished his beer, and stood up. “Thank you.” He sat next to Bucky on the couch, still a whole cushion away but near enough to feel his body heat, and grabbed the other beer. “Want to see the movie?”

Bucky thought that the reasonable thing to do would be to say no, that of course he didn’t want to watch something that would upset Steve and remind him of something so terrible, but there was a dark humor about the way that Steve said it, about how he was trusting Bucky with this and allowing it to exist between them. So he said yes.


End file.
